Tag Archives: hardcore

987. the dream

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You had to love the cover of Tupelo Chain Sex’s Spot the Difference. Little punk kid sporting a Ronald Reagan Adolph Hitler t-shirt, getting pulled two ways at once. But the real treasure was the music. Not just another hardcore band from LA, these guys had former Frank Zappa alumni Sugarcane Harris in their midst (not to mention a guy named Stumuk blowing a monster sax) and thus were brilliantly all over the place. Reggae, dub, ska, jazz, rockabilly, hardcore – everything, with lead off track The Dream (an extrapolation on an old Cab Calloway hit) serving as a whip smart intro to what remains one of the great (mostly) forgotten albums of any era.

Tupelo Chain Sex - Spot the Difference

1013. themselves

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Second of two in a row from the Minutemen‘s Double Nickels on the Dime, a double album featuring forty-three mostly hard, mostly fast, mostly abrupt nuggets that manage to be unerringly smart, angry, political, and damned good. Themselves, at one-minute-eighteen seconds, doesn’t even feel rushed, just urgent, because all the men who work the land need to wake the f*** up and see beyond the rhetoric. True in 1984. True in 2016.

Minutemen-doubleNICKELS

1014. maybe partying will help

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First of two in a row from the Minutemen‘s Double Nickels on the Dime, arguably the best double album of the 1980s. Because 1984 was supposed to be the year that we all finally found ourselves in George Orwell’s living hell, betrayers of love, loving only Big Brother. But if you were digging deep, steering clear of the sewage that was flooding the mainstream, you had punk-rock-hardcore-whatever-you-want-to-call-it getting ambitious (progressive even), swinging hard for the fences in all kinds of cool ways. And the Minutemen were leading that charge.

Minutemen-1984

1065. wish you were here

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Curious George were one of many solid (if messy) punk-hardcore-whatever bands slamming around Vancouver in those curious years of perpetual struggle (otherwise known as the 1980s), their cover of this rather tired Pink Floyd original driving home the point that it’s seldom the song that’s wrong, only the performance. There is nothing wrong with this performance.

1067. Repo Man

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfivq3Ou4_M

If you were there at the time (1984) and paying attention, Repo Man (the movie) was pretty much perfect, nailing all the right targets, scoring all the right points, and it all started with Iggy Pop cutting loose over the opening credits. Welcome to the so-called Winter of Hate, with Repo Man (and its punk-hardcore-whatever-you-want-to-call-it soundtrack) giving this long weird season (it lasted years) a fierce and virulent focus. Not that there wasn’t any love in the mid-80s. Of course there was. But you couldn’t really make sense of the times and your place in them (in North America anyway) until you owned your hate. Until you knew what to hate. Otherwise, you were just going to get eaten by hungry robots like everybody else. Or nuked. Whichever came first.

RepoMAN